Online Community - Rate Your Music

Rate Your Music is a non-commercial online community dedicated to music. This community encourages its members to share music knowledge, repertoires and opinions by rating albums, writing reviews and contributing to a variety of music related forums.

Rate Your Music has members from right across the world, the most common countries being: USA, UK, Canada, Australia and Brazil. These members are self confessed ‘music addicts’ who come to this site to share knowledge, learn from others and make friends with people who have similar music tastes. As membership is free, most members return to Rate Your Music regularly to read the latest album reviews and to meet up with friends in the forums.

Although Rate Your Music does not generate profits from membership fees or advertising, it can still be classified as a successful online community. As at 3 May 2006, there were 40716 members, traffic averaged 14817/week and reach/million averaged 105/week.

One problem with Rate Your Music is that it relies completely on volunteers to moderate the site. Although volunteers do not cost any money, they are not always willing to dedicate substantial time and effort to the community. Without the continued support of volunteers, the site could not operate. To counter this, Rate Your Music regularly asks users to donate money, time or skills to site operation.

I chose to join Rate Your Music to learn more about my favourite bands and to share my (somewhat limited) musical knowledge. Since joining, I have catalogued and rated my music, reviewed some of my favourite albums and entered into forum discussions. I enjoy this community as it allows me to interact with people who have similar tastes and to share my musical opinions. Oh, and it is free!